Child Social Media Bans Have Nothing To Do With Children And Their Welfare.

A ban on children using social media is not just a ban on children. To enforce it, every user must prove who they are. That means the real target is not child safety. It is online anonymity.

Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash

A new trend of social media bans for children is sweeping the world, with the UK the latest country to announce such measures. Usually, these are targeted at children under 16 years old, but sometimes they apply to children under 14. The justifications being used have some merit, but as has been persuasively argued, such bans have the effect of undermining parental authority and the sovereignty of the home. The other aspect of these bans is that, to ban children from social media, you inevitably have to verify every user’s identity. This has the potential to undermine the flowering of free expression that followed social media’s breaking of the monopoly over public discourse once held by centralised media sources.

Those of us who grew up in 1990s South Africa were the last generation in this country to experience the world before and after the internet and social media revolution. We saw how centralised platforms such as TV networks, radio stations, newspapers, record labels, and movie studios went from dominating public discourse to many of them now being on the brink of going out of business.

When this happened, an important change in how we are governed started to take hold. Governments could no longer create the appearance of consensus by seeking agreement among the people who controlled the various sources of information. This is how humans have been governed for most of history, and it is breaking down. To see this, look at how rapid political change has become.

In France, the UK, America, South Africa, Botswana, Argentina, and elsewhere, established political parties and politicians have suffered embarrassing losses. In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is now the largest party. In France, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have been the top two presidential contenders for several election cycles, despite neither representing the traditional governing parties. In Botswana, the governing party’s dominance ended after 58 years. Similarly, in South Africa, the once-mighty ANC now relies on parties that former President Mandela once referred to as “Mickey Mouse parties” to stay in power.

And this is not the end of it. This inability to manufacture consensus affects other issues as well. The COVID lockdowns were ended, at least in part, by this failure. Governments mandated lockdowns, but people could talk to each other, reason through the advice being given by so-called experts, and decide for themselves whether it made sense. They could also see the experts who were being ignored in order to create the impression of uniform opinion among specialists.

A similar phenomenon can be observed with climate change. People can freely debate the far-reaching policy changes being suggested by governments to allegedly avoid climate disaster. They can question whether it really makes sense to mothball perfectly functional coal power stations in an energy-scarce country, on an even more energy-scarce continent, for the sake of reducing CO₂ emissions. They can review for themselves the predictions made by figures such as Al Gore and see how those predictions stack up against reality.

Similarly, when it comes to manufacturing consent for war, it is no longer possible for governments, through their regulatory power over the media, to lionise “our” side and demonise the other side to the same extent. People can see and hear Palestinians in Gaza speaking for themselves. They can compare statements from the IRGC with those coming from the Pentagon and decide for themselves what makes sense and what does not.

This is very scary to those in power. I have been thinking for a while about how they would deal with these challenges because ruling elites have always needed this ability, if for no other reason than to sell unpopular wars to the populace. I believe that a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), combined with mandatory identity verification for using social media, is part of the answer. No doubt there are other measures being planned as well.

Of course, to introduce these inherently unpopular measures, you have to sell them by cloaking them in causes people care about. Nothing is as powerful in this regard as protecting children. You do not come out and say that you want everyone to register in order to use social media. Instead, you only talk about social media bans for children. Of course, there is no way to enforce such a ban unless you require identification from everyone using social media.

If you think this is just me being paranoid, consider how sudden and widespread the calls for such bans have been. It reminds me of how countries around the world suddenly decided that lockdowns were the way to prevent the spread of a relatively minor virus in 2019 and 2020. At the same time, central banks around the world began talking about Central Bank Digital Currencies.

These are some of the countries that have implemented or are in the process of implementing such bans: Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, the UK, Canada, France, Denmark, Spain, Greece, and Austria. You can expect more to follow once it is seen that there is minimal resistance. In America, TikTok was forced to sell its US operations to an American consortium. This came after embarrassing moments such as TikTok users rediscovering Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and deciding that it made sense, as well as TikTok users expressing support for Palestine over Israel.

In South Africa, there are calls by the Chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Communications, Mrs Khusela Sangoni-Diko, to regulate podcasts. Undoubtedly, once social media bans take effect in Western countries, these will be used, as so often happens, as justification for doing the same here. At the same time, there are increasing attempts to broaden the scope of hate speech beyond what is currently limited by the Constitution. Once everyone has to identify themselves, those deemed to have violated this broader definition of hate speech will almost certainly face legal consequences.

Of course, parts of the media are doing their part by releasing exposés on topics such as the manosphere, Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica. Traditional media has a clear interest in ensuring that social media platforms have less freedom than they do now. This would make it easier to apply to those platforms the same constraints that legacy, centralised media already faces. These are regulations that legacy media is already structured to navigate. It is nothing more than the usual story of established players pushing for regulation against smaller competitors. The competitors for advertising spending may be the social media platforms themselves, but the competitors for content creation are the users of those platforms.

Finally, we must think seriously about what steps governments would need to take to push the modern world into a destructive global conflict, possibly a conflict between America and China arising from what is often called Thucydides’ Trap. Controlling the money supply to enable unlimited spending without immediately triggering price inflation, at the cost of impoverishing everyone else, would be one such step. Wars cost unbelievable quantities of money, and modern welfare states mean that levels of spending once associated only with wartime have become routine. Controlling information would be the other critical step. Social media currently makes this difficult, if not impossible. Therefore, in the name of protecting children, there is every incentive to destroy anonymity on social media.

Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.